Workshop on Open Educational Resources held at Apeejay Stya University, Sohna, Haryana, India- 26-28 April 2013
Workshop on Open Educational Resources held at Apeejay Stya University, Sohna, Haryana, India-26-28 April 2013
Commonwealth Educational Media Centre for Asia (CEMCA) supported the Workshop on ‘Open Educational Resources’ held at the Apeejay Stya University (ASU) Campus located at Sohna- Palwal Road from 26th April 2013 to 28th April 2013. The workshop was organized to train the faculty members of Apeejay Stya University (ASU) and other Apeejay Institutions of higher learning with an objective to promote the use of OER to leverage the potential value of OER to improve the quality of curriculum, content and instructions, and facilitate academic collaboration and enhance equitable access to knowledge resource. The inaugural session on 26th April, was attended by 40 Persons including 25 teacher participants, University dignitaries and invited Guests & Speakers.
Dr. K.K. Dwivedi, Vice Chancellor of ASU welcomed Chief Guest Dr. Sanjaya Mishra, Director (CEMCA) and other Guests. One of the key points he emphasized was education has become affordable to large number of people through OER as high quality courseware is available for free. Dr. R. Sreedher, Professor Emeritus, ASU and former Director of CEMCA gave an overview of OER. He also said that the difficulty faced is that teachers are more interested in getting royalty income for their Web postings of course materials. He emphasized that CEMCA’s commitment to promote OER and its partnership with Apeejay Stya University will help develop quality learning materials.
Dr. Sanjaya Mishra said that there should be a strong commitment for the university in terms of policy to go into OER. He urged the University to consider the institutional OER policy template developed by CEMCA for its adoption. While giving a description of the activities of CEMCA and the Commonwealth of Learning, he stated that focus of all activities in both formal an informal education sector is to foster learning for development. Giving a brief introduction to the OER Paris declaration, he urged the faculty to consider sharing the knowledge resources created by them in open license. He stated that the workshop resources persons, including Dr. Savithri Singh, will provide hands on training on using a wiki platform to develop OER and the University may consider having its own wiki hosting facility thereby also helping building institutional image as a supporter of Open Educational Resources. He congratulated the leadership at ASU to have taken the first step in this direction to promote OER amongst the teachers.
Post inaugural session, the workshop was facilitated by Dr. Savithri Singh and Dr. Sarita Kumar from Acharya Narendra Dev College, New Delhi. Using the WikiEducator platform, the workshop covered basic wiki skills such as creating document, editing, and uploading the same to the platform. The workshops also covered use of internal and external links, and uploading of different media to the platform. Participants were also introduced to the discussion page, and how OER can promote student engagement and quality of learning as well as the materials. Detailed discussion on open licensing of learning materials, especially the types of open licenses in the Creative Commons were also discussed during the workshop.
At the end of the workshop, participants shared their views on the learning and provided feedback on the workshop and Mr. V. Thyagarajan, Head- Training and Corporate Resources, ASU proposed vote of thanks to the workshop resource persons and participants.
